Scholarship at Bluffton

Making a case for change

Dr. Jonathan Andreas believes economists use the wrong statistic to determine the
most common measure of a group s welfare. And he invokes Bill Gates to make his point.
Per capita income, whether of a family or a country, is determined by the mean, or
average, income of the group s members. So, if Gates walks into a room, its occupants
average, and per capita, income will rise but that doesn't mean everyone s welfare
will also increase, maintains Andreas, an assistant professor of economics.

He asserts that a more accurate reflection of the wellbeing of individuals in a group
is median income the actual income of the person in the middle of the pack. Nobody
cares about median income in economics, says Andreas, arguing that use of mean income makes wealth look greater than it really
is for the average person. This should be our policy goal, to increase median income.
To illustrate, he notes that more than half of Americans have yet to regain their
real earning power of 10 years ago, thanks to a 2001 recession that was among the
smallest on record but was severe in terms of median income. For most Americans, their
real income dropped for years, adds Andreas, pointing out that many people felt the
recession continued well beyond its official end in November 2001.

He is now trying to make his case about median income which was part of his doctoral
dissertation at the University of Illinois-Chicago in broader forums. Andreas, who
earned his Ph.D. in economics in 2009, has an upcoming article about his research
in the Journal of History of Economic Thought. He also plans to present his work at
two economics conferences this year and eventually to publish his dissertation in
a book. Publishing in economics wasn't in his plans when Andreas graduated from Grinnell
College in Iowa with a bachelor s degree in American studies. I had no interest in
economics in college at all, he admits. But that changed when, after graduation, he
spent three years traveling and working in developing countries in Central America
and Asia, seeing disparities between nations that were explained by economic variables,
he says. I wanted to learn why there are such huge differences, he continues, and
why some people are rich and some are poor.

Still, as he moved through graduate school at Illinois- Chicago where he also holds
a master s degree in economics and on to Bluffton in 2007, I never really intended
to publish, Andreas says. He thought he could make a difference in people s lives
through teaching, he explains, and considered research a way of becoming a better
teacher, but then I stumbled across something I think can make some difference in
the field of economics through publication. A Schultz Fellowship from the university
is providing additional time this year and next for Andreas to work on enhancing his
dissertation, including his argument about median income. Economists are constantly
criticized for doing a poor job with ethical decisions about individual well-being,
he says. This is a place where we could improve. If we re not paying attention to
the statistical measures, we re not going to have policies that help people.

Tools for teachers; success for students

Teaching remedial reading in Topeka, Kan., in the 1980s, Dr. Sarah Cecire found, with
the help of some fourth- and fifth-graders, what has become the focus of her research
during the last 20 years. Her students enjoyed word processing projects on the Apple
IIe computers that were then new to schools, recalls Cecire, now a professor of education
at Bluffton. And when she introduced Twist-a-plot stories, which allowed students
to take stories in different directions electronically, she had fourth- and fifth-graders
begging to stay in from recess to read and write. I got really interested in the technology
at that point because it took these disinterested kids and made them want to read,
she says. I got the interest because it captured the interest of my students.

Creative use of educational software to enhance teaching and learning has been the
primary subject of Cecire's research ever since. Holder of a Ph.D. in educational
technology from Kansas State University, she has made more than two dozen presentations
on the topic at national and regional conferences, and about 20 more at workshops
and teacher in-service programs. She was also a contributor to The online learning
idea book: 95 proven ways to enhance technology-based and blended learning, published
in 2007. The last two years, Cecire has been a presenter at the national spring conference
of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities Center for Research in Adult
Learning. Her subjects have been Wikis in the classroom and assignments to engage
students in online/blended learning environments; at this year s conference, she is
presenting on use of Web 2.0 tools.

In 2001-02, Cecire was the Ameritech/SBC Fellow from the state of Ohio. In that role,
she developed materials to aid faculty in creating student-centered Web activities;
created an assessment tool to assist colleges teacher education departments in determining
how to integrate technology into their programs; and conducted faculty development
workshops. Since coming to Bluffton in 2006, she has added to her list of presentations
through her work on the value-added component of the Ohio Department of Education
s school district report cards. As a value-added specialist, she has been training
school personnel, first in Delaware, Ohio, and for the last few years in a seven-county
area of west central Ohio.

Applied to students in grades 3-8, the value-added dimension is used to determine
individual schools impact on children by measuring how much they progress from one
year to the next. By comparing students to themselves, value-added helps factor out
home environments and better include top students, who have sometimes been short-changed
by achievement testing aimed primarily at bringing low students up to increase passage
rates. All students top, average and struggling can show growth, notes Cecire, also
Bluffton's director of graduate programs in education and co-editor of The Ohio Journal
of Teacher Education. It s not perfect, she concedes about value-added, but it s better
than the previous model, where you had to have a certain percentage of students pass
the achievement test. The goal is school improvement, Cecire points out, adding that
research has indicated that the impact of a series of effective teachers can mitigate
even the effects of poverty on students. That s what this is after how we can make
our teachers as effective as possible, she says.

Research in the church

Dr. Gerald Mast was introduced to substantive research as a Malone College undergraduate
in the mid-1980s. He then learned about presenting and publishing findings as a graduate
student at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1996, one year after earning his Ph.D.
in rhetoric and communication at Pittsburgh, Mast came to Bluffton, where he has put
the research skills he acquired to extensive use.

The professor of communication has written or co-authored two books and been co-editor
of three others. His next book, The Calling of Christ: Being the Church in Life and
Vocation, is scheduled for publication in fall 2011. About the same time, Mast expects
book-form publication of a collection of essays which he is editing with Trevor Bechtel,
assistant professor of religion that were written for a 2009 Bluffton conference on
16th-century Anabaptist leader Pilgrim Marpeck. In addition, he and Dr. J. Denny Weaver,
his co-author and a Professor Emeritus of religion, are working on a follow-up to
their 2009 book, Defenseless Christianity.

Among his other projects for publication, Mast is writing an entry for the fifth volume
and the first since 1967 of Mennonitisches Lexicon, the German-language Mennonite
encyclopedia. And he just finished an essay on what he calls the myth of redemptive
violence in evangelical popular culture, which will be published within a three-volume
set of essays on that culture. The latter writings are only the most recent additions
to a list of academic articles and chapters, nonacademic essays, encyclopedia entries
and book reviews that runs--- along with his list of conference and other invited
presentations for several pages. I ve been a fairly eclectic researcher, says Mast,
adding that the relationship between language, especially religious language, and
social change has taken a central role in the last decade.

That focus has evolved from an interest in slogans of social movements, which was
related to his first significant research project at Malone. He was in a rhetorical
theory and criticism class taught by Dr. Kim Phipps, now president of Messiah College,
who required group research projects apply in rhetorical theory to American social
movements of the 1960s and 70s. While other groups studied the civil rights, women
s and anti-war movements, his group addressed the gay rights movement. Malone s library
had a complete absence of resources on the topic, Mast remembers. But the AIDS crisis
had just begun and, when the members of his group went looking for information at
the University of Akron, they saw fliers and brochures for AIDS activists. They subsequently
located one who not only exposed them to gay literature but also traveled to Malone
to speak to the class about his life and activities as an activist.

That was my first major initiation to research that went beyond a library to talking
with the people whose activities and ideas he was studying, says Mast, who graduated
from Malone in 1987 with a bachelor s degree in communication arts. Moving on to Pittsburgh,
he encountered rhetoric and communication faculty who expected graduate students not
to stop at writing papers but to present them as well at National Communication Association
and other conferences. They were absolutely committed to getting us into the national
conversation, he recalls, and that extended to publication. Many of them provided
pages of commentary meant to help students revise their papers for presentation, he
says, and one, Dr. John Poulakos, pushed students to carefully consider feedback from
conference audiences that would lead to further revisions and submission for publication.
Those teachers saw his work in the range of possibility for publication, Mast continues,
and they taught me how to write, including how to form an argument.

His first book, Separation and the Sword in Anabaptist Persuasion was published in
2006. His second solo effort is The Calling of Christ, which deals with how church
routines and practices from communion to committee meetings shape individuals daily
lives. The publisher, Herald Press, wants the book to be read and discussed in Sunday
school classes, Mast says. He s also trying, he notes, to make it accessible to college
students who he hopes will be persuaded to go to church despite its flawed, imperfect
people and usable in some of their classes. You can t live the Christian life without
being shaped by its practices, he argues, pointing out that he unapologetically makes
a case in the book for rooting one s life in those practices. Doing so gives individuals
leverage against reduction of their identity to their work and consumption, he says,
explaining that popular media often change people into consumers and identify them
by what they buy. The church provides leverage against that complete domination, Mast
maintains. An editor of Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History and vice chair
of The Mennonite magazine board, Mast has also been adviser for many communication
students departmental honors projects.

Birth of a book

When Dr. Lamar Nisly says that getting a book published involves periods of anticipation
and long periods of waiting, the professor of English speaks from experience. His
new book, about Southern Catholic writers Flannery O Connor, Tim Gautreaux and Walker
Percy, was published in January by Mercer University Press. But its roots go back
to his graduate-school experience at the University of Delaware in the 1990s. I've
had a lot of interest in these authors for a lot of years, says Nisly, noting that
O Connor was the subject of his father s doctoral dissertation. Paul Nisly was also
an English professor, at Messiah College, where his son earned his bachelor s degree
in 1990.

When he got to graduate school, Lamar Nisly wanted to explore something in the realm
of literature and religion. He was interested in the faith-related questions and issues
raised by O'Connor and Percy. Their fiction became part of the focus of his dissertation,
and Gautreaux entered the picture after Nisly heard him read one of his short stories
at a conference in the late 90s. He subsequently bought a collection of Gautreaux's
stories, and I've been hooked ever since, he admits. Nisly did his initial work on
what would become the book Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, and Pilgrim Wayfarers:
Constructions of Audience and Tone in O'Connor, Gautreaux, and Percy for a summer
2002 conference on American Literature and the Question of Belief at Calvin College.
By spring 2008, the book had been accepted for publication by Mercer, where it remained
in the queue until its recent release. You have to love a project if you re going
to live with it for so many years, says Nisly, who came to Bluffton after graduating
from Delaware with his Ph.D. in 1996.

Since then, not surprisingly, a number of his many published and reprinted articles,
invited lectures and conference papers and presentations have dealt with one or more
of the three writers highlighted in the book. In addition to academics, its audience,
he hopes, will include devotees of Southern culture and those interested in how authors
address audiences to whom they want to communicate matters of faith. O'Connor, Gautreaux
and Percy do that in very different ways, despite their common regional and religious
backgrounds, says Nisly. He attributes those differences to their individual experiences
with Catholicism and how they were influenced by the Second Vatican Council in the
early 1960s. Nisly's next book project is Conversations with Tim Gautreaux, which
he is editing and is tentatively scheduled for publication in 2012.

Returning to his interest in literature and religion, he is considering a future research
project on how sin is used as a touchstone in fiction. He is also thinking about studying
how a range of American literature looks at fears about security an offshoot of his
stint as Bluffton's Pathways Civic Engagement Scholar in 2008-09, when the civic engagement
theme on campus was Living with Uncertainty. Regardless of the project, what you end
up getting into is intriguing, says Nisly, who also chairs the humanities division
at Bluffton. I do enjoy research, he adds, tracing that back to his father and the
importance of reading in his family, and to his college experience. I like having
a chance to focus on it.

A collector, collator of knowledge

You might say that research comes naturally to Dr. Alex Sider. A test aimed at revealing
its takers strengths has indicated that one of Sider's is input, identifying him as
a collector and collator of knowledge, the assistant professor of religion says. And
reading, learning more about a topic and adding to the collection of information for
his projects are what feel like working most naturally, he adds. So it may not be
surprising that Sider, a Bluffton faculty member since 2006, currently has three books
in the works. Publication of his doctoral dissertation in book form is scheduled for
February 2011, and he hopes a second book, about preaching in emergent churches, will
follow in the spring. He s earlier in the process on the third one, whose subject
is medical ethics.

Sider, who earned his Ph.D. in theology and ethics from Duke University in 2004, addressed
20th-century Mennonite historian and theologian John Howard Yoder in his dissertation.
In the resulting book, Sider says, he tries to show the deep sense in which Yoder was connected to many streams of thought about forgiveness and salvation, for
example in the Christian tradition. In addition, he argues that the Gospel isn't about
getting rid of conflict as he says many Christians now want to do but rather about
demonstrating patient, forgiving and reconciling ways of dealing with it. A number
of Christians think that Jesus will protect them from significant negativity and conflict,
the presence of which indicates, they believe, that something must be going wrong
in their lives, Sider explains. But that isn't and can t be true, he continues, saying
there can be no forgiveness and reconciliation without conflict between people. Christianity
is a therapy for that, he maintains.

Most of the book about emergent churches, titled Presence: Giving and Receiving God,
is a compilation of sermons preached by Sider and the Rev. Isaac Villegas over several
years after they helped found Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship. Sider describes
emergent churches as generally urban and small, with congregations of young, or disaffected
young, professionals who are spiritual but not religious per se. They tend to worship
in a contemporary style but also want a more contemplative experience than megachurch
Christians, he says. The idea for compiling the sermons emerged from the realization
that a lot of emergent church worship emphasizes spiritual practices but not necessarily
preaching, Sider notes. Believing the Gospel isn't good news until it has been received
as both good and news, he and Villegas focused on congregational response to their
sermons, inviting a discussion on what the people had just heard. Such preaching back
to the preacher gives authority to the congregation and combats church leadership
by dint of the preacher s personality, which is often the case in emergent churches
and has been the undoing of some, Sider points out.

While helping democratize leadership in the small churches, the approach also combats
the notion of congregation members as passive receptors of the message by seeking
a response from them, he adds. It s tremendous as a preacher to pour your heart and
soul into a message but have it come back to you in new and completely unexpected
ways, he says, calling it invigorating for the pastor and empowering for the congregation.
Although a few years away from completion, his third book, on medical ethics, will
deal in part with the central roles of dependency and vulnerability in human life.
I decided to work on this out of family struggles with chronic illness, and also because
I have a historical perspective on the connections between medicine and theology that
a lot of the contemporary literature lacks, says Sider, who teaches a class on medicine,
suffering and Christian belief.

His research, he says, informs him about how arguments on various topics have been
extended through time. But he s not only a storehouse but also a translator, thinking
about how to communicate those arguments to his students in ways other than those
found in books, Sider adds. Research makes me better as a teacher, he says. I feel
I have a lot of historical and contemporary examples to bring to bear on what I have
to teach.